The Diary of a Zen Mama

Finalist of the 2025 Book Excellence AwardDuring this startling memoir, Rebecca leaves home in Borough Park, Brooklyn for the first time at seventeen to go to college and explore the outside world. As destiny accompanies her, she instantly meets her acting teacher and ten weeks later, on her eighteenth birthday, runs away with him in a blizzard and gets married. Lance, from a different culture, is forbidden to her, though.Once news of the marriage gets out, Rebecca becomes an outcast, and both are thrown out of college as well. Now, she now must find her true home, and where she belongs. She and Lance move into his flat in Greenwich village as he tells her that he can never make her happy, she must do that for herself.Shocked, Rebecca clings to her book on Zen for guidance, wondering where her Zen Master could be? Incredibly, one day he appears. Rebecca meets a powerful, charismatic Japanese Zen Master, with whom she practices for the next forty-five years. Their unbreakable relationship and his liberating teachings permeate both the memoir and her life.Yet the past is waiting to flood back into her life. All kinds of danger arise, as Rebecca is finally forced to return to her roots and continue at the zendo at the same time. We explore her reunion with her family, and her mothering her children as her marriage becomes threatened. Torn apart by what seems like radical differences between Jewish and Zen practices and worlds, she finally experiences the incredible connection between them. It becomes clear that Judaism and Zen uplift and empower one another, and that like two wings of a bird, both are needed to fly. And, despite insoluble differences with Lance, Rebecca is now able to experience a different kind of love. One that cannot be threatened, no matter what. Above all, she sees that our children are the true teachers, and becoming a real Mamma is enlightenment itself. Read more